Nearly 3 Decades Later, This Horror Masterpiece With a Perfect Twist Is a Streaming Hit

The spring and summer of 1999 was a huge one for movies. The Matrix blew audience’s minds with bullet time, and The Phantom Menace brought George Lucas back to Star Wars even as it irritated some fans with Jar Jar Binks. South Park hit the big screen with a filthy musical, and Being John Malkovich made clear that Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman would be worth watching for a while.

In the middle of all of these, a scary movie from an entirely new director, starring a child actor best known for playing the young Forrest Gump, became a surprise smash. Word of mouth helped carry it to a worldwide gross of $672 million, and its director began to accrue a (mostly) reliable reputation as a master of suspense. And twists, of course. We can’t forget the twists, which became his stock in trade, for better and sometimes worse. That first big one, however, hit the spot.

“I See Dead People”

That hit is The Sixth Sense, a scary tale of a boy who talks to ghosts and the shrink who tries to help him, which just charted in Netflix’s Top Ten movies worldwide. It’s no surprise why — for the Halloween season, people like scary movies, and good ones that are safe for most of the family can be tough to find. Maybe some newer audiences are fans of director M. Night Shyamalan’s more recent twisty chillers like The Visit or Old, and are looking back to see what else he’s done. And maybe for some, 1999 was so long ago that they can’t recall the perfect twist, which revealed that Bruce Willis’ child psychologist Malcolm Crowe had actually been killed at the beginning of the film, and was unknowingly dead the whole time, only visible to Haley Joel Osment’s Cole.

The ’90s were a different time in terms of protecting spoilers: 1996’s Ransom, starring Mel Gibson, revealed its big second-act shocker as a marketing hook in all the trailers. The Sixth Sense‘s trailers showed star Osment saying, “I see dead people,” and the movie itself takes so long to get to that scene that some viewers, upon hearing there was a twist, might have thought that was it. The beauty of the swerve, then, wasn’t just its existence, but the way it hit viewers with the more obvious reveal first, so they weren’t ready for the narrative counterpunch.

The “dead the whole time” twist arguably began with Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which became a French short film that was repurposed as a Twilight Zone episode. 1962’s Carnival of Souls, while not a big hit in its day, influenced many other directors with its use of that twist, among other creepy devices. In 1990, Jacob’s Ladder gained a cult following with a version of the same surprise.

Yet Shyamalan’s take defined his career — his two previous films had been a personal drama about faith and a Rosie O’Donnell comedy, but since 1999, he has primarily been known for suspense stories with twists. It’s hard to say if any of them have ever quite lived up to The Sixth Sense, but it certainly isn’t for lack of trying.